Hey there and welcome to another great episode of the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast.

So if you don’t know how this podcast works, it’s pretty straightforward.

I essentially take listener questions and answer them to the best of my ability. Usually these questions relate to breakups, wanting an ex back, trying to get over an ex, everything in that realm.

And today we’re going to hear from a guy named Sebastian who has a question about jealousy, specifically, what kind of jealousy works, if you should use it and the personality types that it will work on.

But before I actually do play Sebastian’s question, my recommendation for you if you’re going through a breakup is to first gauge your situation and figure out if you even have a chance of getting your ex-girlfriend back.

And luckily for you, we put together a special resource on our website, which has been newly redesigned www.exgirlfriendrecovery.com.

It’s a special quiz designed to tell you what kind of chance you have of getting your ex girlfriend back, it’s free and it only takes two minutes to take. So my biggest recommendation for any newbie out there who’s just starting to listen to the podcast is you stop by our website and take our quiz because it will give you the ultimate starting point for what you should be doing going forward.

Hey Chris, this is Sebastian.

It was actually difficult to come up with a question that you haven’t maybe previously answered in one of your podcasts, YouTube videos, articles, or even eBooks. So my question is, when is it appropriate to make a jealousy post for social media? A little bit of background about me.

I dated for four and a half years, she fell out of love with me, and she broke up with me. Three weeks later, I successfully did a 30 day no contact and then we’ve been texting ever since. We’ve had 16 text exchanges so far, six of those she’s initiated, but I’ve gotten to the point to where I’m trying to build attraction, I’m sending some flirty texts and I’m getting neutral responses.

And I even got a no response once.

So I’m wondering if a jealousy post will help me cross that line to where she’d be more receptive of the flirting and the attraction text.

Let me know what you think.

All right, Sebastian, thank you so much for your question.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

So ultimately I want to kind of divide up this podcast episode into three distinct categories, which is,

The last time I actually wrote about jealousy was maybe about four or five years ago.

And we’ve learned a lot more since then about what works and what doesn’t work.

So let’s look at this podcast episode as kind of the more updated version behind what we’ve learned about jealousy. So let’s hit the ground running.

And ultimately it depends.

So, what do I mean by that?

Well, I think a lot of people misinterpret jealousy because they only look at one singular strategy as the be-all end-all.

We see this commonly with the no contact rule.

You’ll hear people talk about the no contact rule and how important it is to use the no contact rule, but they have kind of this false belief that all they need to do to get your ex backs is just implement the no contact rule.

And it’s a lot more complicated than that.

Jealousy is kind of within that same category of complication.

Jealousy where you’re finding is a great enhancer to your overall strategy assuming that you want your ex back.

We do notice from interviewing many different success stories that there are many different factors that are patterns that the people who are successful are exhibiting that the people who aren’t successful aren’t exhibiting.

So what are some of those patterns?

Well, the first pattern we see is they’re using a no contact rule and they’re extremely disciplined with that no contact rule.

Generally speaking, they don’t break it.

The second thing is they’re using the time during no contact wisely. In other words, oftentimes you’ll hear someone who gets their ex back get to this place emotionally where they just don’t even care about getting their ex back.

It’s almost like, “Hey, that would be great if I got them back, but I’ll live without them.”

And achieving that frame of mind we’re finding is more and more important the more success stories we get a chance to interview, but we have also noticed a pattern of fear of loss.

Generally speaking, when you have the first two factors, when you are implementing a no contact rule and when you are really working on that mindset of basically not caring, I call it the devil may care attitude. It’s just sort of like, “Eh, you know what, whatever happens happens.”

That sometimes isn’t enough in and of itself to make your ex girlfriend want to come back. Oftentimes she, excuse me, needs an urgent reason to want to come back. And that is given to her through a fear of loss. Feeling like she’s going to lose you forever.

And that’s by seeing other women quote unquote, come in on her territory. So, I think jealousy can work if it’s not the only strategy that you’re using and you know that her personality type will take it seriously.

So let’s talk about the personality types for a little bit now.

And this is a really complicated question because we find that jealousy works really well on these types of personalities, but it’s not always a good idea if you know your ex girlfriend can’t handle the jealousy in a mature way.

Okay.

So what are the personality types?

And ultimately, if you’re looking for me to say, “Hey, this is attachment style,” I’m not going to do that.

I’m going to actually just do what we have noticed work on, for our clients on different exes, right?

But that doesn’t necessarily answer the question, if we should be using jealousy in those particular personality traits.

And for this, I’m just going to tell you to be practical and use your gut.

Sometimes and I believe if you look at the reality of the situation, when you’re looking at jealousy, you need to approach it from the perspective of, is this going to help me achieve my goal?

I’m not here to help you try to make your ex girlfriend angry, to manipulate her, or anything like that.

I’m here to help you rebuild a relationship with her.

So if you know that jealousy on your particular ex girlfriend works too well to the point where she can’t contain herself and will grow furious, it’s probably just not a good idea to use it. It’s not that important of a strategy to the overall success rate to be the essential. If you’re finding your ex girlfriend just cannot handle jealousy in a mature type of a way, then maybe don’t use it on her.

This of course leads us to a more interesting question.

What is considered a mature type of way of handling jealousy?

Personally speaking, I think jealousy and feeling jealous over your partner talking to a member of the opposite sex is natural and even encouraged because it kind of tells both parties, hey, I care and they care. But I’m going to tell you what’s not natural, is if your ex-girlfriend has literally gotten in a fight, like a physical fight with you or the other woman that you’re just talking to, that’s maybe very platonic, that’s not a healthy way or a mature way for that matter of handling jealousy.

So use your gut and use common sense.

But, now we come to the more interesting question and that is, what type of jealousy do we see work?

When I first started out, I don’t know if any of you know my history because the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast here is pretty new. My other podcast, the Ex Boyfriend Recovery Podcast, I know very [inaudible 00:10:19] is a lot older, it has over 150 to 200 episodes, a lot of the listeners there know me, they know my history and everything, but the backstory behind when I first started, I first started in, I think 2012, the years just blend together for me now. And I was just a college kid who was just giving people particularly women advice on trying to get their exes back that I thought would work on me.

But the cool part about having people listen to you is you get more data, right? And you actually get to see what’s really working for real people.

And one thing we learned, and one thing I learned right off the bat was, really in your face type of jealousy isn’t a good idea.

Generally speaking, I advise you, if you want to use jealousy to use the less is more approach.

Now, what is the less is more approach?

Well, let’s use two different types of conversation mediums.

We’ll use social media and we’ll also use text messaging.

How should you use jealousy in these two particular types of conversation mediums?

Social media is probably the easiest one to use jealousy in.

We find statistics cite close to about 88% of exes will pay attention to their partner’s profile after a breakup within the first three months.

So it’s a pretty good bet that your ex girlfriend is going to be paying attention to your Facebook profile, Instagram profile, whatever you’re posting on Snapchat, whatever, whatever social media platform is normal for you.

It’s pretty good that your ex-girlfriend’s going to be paying attention to you.

So what you need to do is try the less is more approach. And what I learned is probably the best way of approaching the less is more approach is to literally take another girl out on a date and take a picture of the food with her arm in it, or take pictures of you clinking wine glasses.

This is the less is more approach.

Essentially by putting yourself in a situation that seems more romantic by nature without actually showing you and the other person.

Because what we found is generally speaking, our minds are our own worst enemies. This applies more to my clients who are just heartbroken and desperate to get their exes back but it also applies to your ex, her wondering if you’re with some other woman.

That is going to be even more complicated if she can’t confirm if you’ve got another woman.

And what the cool part is, I get to see both sides of the coin, right? So I work with both men and women. And I can tell you, women are overly obsessive about this if you do it correctly. But that’s the less is more approach on social media.

You can post pictures. What’s the less is more approach on text messaging?

Now, this is a really interesting thing. Ultimately, you’re going to have to use the elude strategy, essentially alluding or putting yourself in a romantic environment when you’re talking to your ex-girlfriend and mentioning that you’re in the romantic environment with a friend. You don’t tell her what gender the friend is. You see if she’s willing to fish. We’ve actually seen this work extremely well for some of our clients on the Ex Recovery Program Facebook group.

If you don’t know, we have a flagship program, there’s no pressure whatsoever, I usually never even talk about it on the podcast, but anyone who buys access to this entry level $47 product, this digital product gets access to our private Facebook support group, which I believe actually, I’m recording now and I can give you exact numbers so I don’t have to beat around the bush. I believe right now the Ex Recovery Program has about, it looks like 4,175 members, all men and women, there’s 24 people waiting to join the group.

So it looks like I need to accept some people, but here’s the point. Last week, there was a girl who literally tried the less is more jealousy sort of texts with her ex and her ex literally came back and the first question was, “Is your friend a guy?” Implying that he’s very interested if she was on a date with someone else.

So the best way to approach this is, if you’re texting your ex pretty consistently, and then maybe you stop texting your ex for a two hour window and text her back after that two hour window and basically say, “Hey, sorry. I was out at a movie with a friend.”

That’s a good example of a less is more approach because you never imply if the friend was a guy friend or just a friend that you’re taking out on a date and you just kind of give her enough rope to kind of come to the conclusions on her own. And that’s how we typically approach jealousy, which is a little different because a lot of guys or a lot of other gurus, I guess would say, “Yeah, yeah. Get the hottest girl at the bar, take a picture with the hottest girl in the bar.” That can work sometimes, but more often than not, we find the less is more approach works better.

Hey there, and welcome to another episode of the Ex-Girlfriend Recovery Podcast. We’ve got a real interesting one scheduled for you today where we’ve got a guy who’s asked a question about what his ex-girlfriend means when she says that they’re being too dependent on each other.

Before I play Mr. Anonymous’s question, because he wanted to remain anonymous, I feel it’s important that if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re struggling through a breakup, probably the first thing you should figure out is whether or not you even have a chance of getting your ex-girlfriend back.

What’s funny is actually the voicemail that I’m about to play literally ends with the guy asking, “Should I give up or not?”

And a really great way to get a quick answer on if you should give up or not is to stop by our website and take our ex recovery chances quiz there on the homepage of the website.

Hi, Chris. This is from Anonymous.

But me and my girlfriend of three years, three and a half … just recently broke up … and she said that she wanted to find her own happiness, that we were becoming too dependent to make ourselves happy when we should be doing it on ourselves. And now that we’ve broken up, I really see what she means and says by all that, and we still care about one another.

At one point in time, we were thinking about getting engaged, so it was pretty serious.

I don’t want to walk away from it. She really does feel like the girl from me. She says I feel like I’m the guy for her, but we just were working on ourselves and trying to better, but she doesn’t want to give me a promise for a future because she doesn’t know the future or how long she’ll need.

I really don’t know if I should just pack up and just move completely on or if I should try to work on myself and hope to win her back over and just any advice on what to do. I feel like I’m just stuck in limbo right now, but I appreciate it.

Okay. There’s a lot to unpack here.

Even though it’s not that long of a voicemail, there’s some really interesting things that we can talk about with his situation.

And before I really do that, I want to give a quick synopsis of what’s going on here with him, really what he’s trying to get at.

Ultimately, the way I’m going to structure this podcast episode is by talking about what she means and what approach should he take.

What does she mean, right?

His ex-girlfriend literally sits there and says, “We’re being too dependent on each other,” for the breakup.

But the trick is, I know what men mean when they say things a lot more easily than what women mean when they say things.

Luckily for you, Mr. Anonymous, I called in my secret weapon to help you out.

I thought I had maybe an idea of what your ex-girlfriend meant, but I don’t want to tell you anything without verifying it by asking real women first.

And so if you don’t know, anyone basically buys any of my programs, the Ex-Boyfriend Recovery Program or the Ex-Girlfriend Recovery Program, get access to this really cool private Facebook support group community where there are over 4,000 members currently.

Most of them are women because we haven’t really launched it to men yet, but we will. Don’t worry, Anonymous. We will launch it.

Anyways, what I did is I basically took notes on your situation. I went to the private Facebook group and I asked the women there, “Hey, what does it mean when a girl says during a breakup that you’re being too dependent on each other?”

And within about five minutes, I got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven responses, which is mind-blowing.

What that tells me is that most women know exactly what it means and also they don’t tell you exactly what they mean in person when they actually say it.

I am just going to read word for word what each of the responses are to you and I want you to stop me when you notice a trend.

Okay.

The trend is very clear already and I put it to the whole 4,000 members of the group, so I’m pretty sure there’ll be like 150 comments by the end of the day.

But after the first seven comments were pretty consistently on point, I don’t think we really need to dive too much deeper into what your ex-girlfriend really means when she says that you’re being too dependent on one another.

It means that she feels you are crowding her too much.

Therefore, she broke up with you. But that really doesn’t tell us what you should do, does it?

I’ve been working with a guy and he is among one of the smartest guys I’ve ever worked with. And him and I were talking about his situation with his ex-girlfriend.

And he was talking about this concept of how, when you date someone long enough, they just create this perception of you. And this perception is what eventually becomes their reality when it comes to thinking about you.

For example, your ex-girlfriend probably thinks you’re this super clingy guy. I don’t know if she thinks you’re insecure, but she thinks that you don’t really have enough swagger on your own, I guess is the way to put it.

And so I was talking with my coaching client and we were basically going through, “Okay, well, what can you do if your ex-girlfriend thinks these kinds of things about you, if you have this negative perception?”

And ultimately I told him this story, and he told me this really interesting story about exes running into each other.

He told me this really interesting story about one of his ex … Well, I don’t know if it was his ex-girlfriend, but it was this girl that he had run into suddenly. After talking with her and after she saw him for who he really was, and was able to peel back the layers, she actually made some really interesting comment.

And every once in a while, if you listen to a female long enough, they do put hints of the truth in their mischievous, little game-playing aspects of communication. And she said this to him. She said, “I thought you were really different than you actually are.”

And then I said to my client, I said I was interviewing a success story. It was a female. But what was really interesting is she told me that her ex ran into her suddenly. It was a genuine run in. It wasn’t staged or anything like that, but she was out and about. She was doing the no contact rule and things of that nature.

Her ex just suddenly runs into her and he gets to see what she’s actually been up to because when you go through this breakup, you are apart from each other and your ex will have certain thoughts about you.

She’ll think something along the lines of, “Yeah, well, he’s partying,” or, “He’s doing this,” or, “He’s doing that.”

And she said that when her ex ran into her, he literally said something along the same lines of, “Wow, I just wasn’t expecting you to be doing so well after the breakup.”

And what this is is kind of the thing I think you’re going to have to do, and that’s rebranding yourself.

How do you rebrand yourself?

Well, what you need to do is something called an accusation audit.

This is something that I’ve recently learned about.

I’ve been reading this really, really fantastic book called Never Split the Difference.

It’s by one of the FBI lead hostage negotiators. And he’s talking about what are the skill levels that work when you apply them to hostage negotiation?

And essentially I think, “Oh, this is perfect.” Your ex isn’t taking you hostage or anything like that but it’s about trying to convince someone who doesn’t want to do something to actually do what you want them to do. What actually works to do that when you’re dealing with hostages and lives are on the line?

And so he talks about this concept of labeling and this thing called an accusation audit.

The accusation audit is basically really being honest with yourself and thinking about all the specifics things that are negative that your ex could say about you.

But I think in your case, Anonymous, which you need to do is do an accusation audit on the negative perception she has of you.

Just looking at the seven women who were the first to respond to my little Facebook group inquiry, it’s pretty clear that they think that you don’t have enough of a life on your own, that your whole identity is wrapped up into this entire relationship with your ex-girlfriend.

I think on your accusation audit, you could say something along the lines of, okay, well, she thinks that there’s nothing more to me than this relationship or she thinks that I’m too attached to this relationship.

And once you have this accusation audit, I’d say think of the 10 worst things that she could think about you.

What you want to do on social media is try to rebrand yourself and directly show that there’s more to you than meets the eye. It sounds kind of simple, but it’s not, because really the key lies in two aspects. Number one is the accusation audit where you’re literally sitting down, you’re thinking to yourself, “Okay, what ways can I think or be super harsh about myself and understand my ex’s negative perception of me?” And this also requires you to have some empathy, which is different than sympathy.

Sympathy is trying to make your ex feel better. Empathy is trying to understand her world. And that’s what you need. You need to understand things from her point-of-view.

And that’s why I went to the women to ask them these questions, “What does his ex-girlfriend mean when she says this?”

And basically, I mean, “Oh yeah, I’m feeling suffocated in the relationship. We spend too much time together. I feel like he doesn’t have any hobbies of his own.” Well, these are perfect things for you to put in your accusation audit.

You’re going to be better than me at coming up with your own accusation audit because you know what your ex-girlfriend has told you and you can kind of get the vibes from her.

But the second part of what you really need to do is try to find a way to show and don’t tell. The number one mistake I see with men is when they see their ex-girlfriends after a breakup, the first thing they try to go into is this tell mentality, “Oh, I’m so much better,” but it’s almost always more powerful for her to come to the conclusion all by herself, like, “Oh, wow, he’s different.” I mean, it’s like a positioning thing. And one of the best ways to do that is utilize social media to show all of the new hobbies you have.

And really this is the key to our program.

Our program emulates moving on. I talk about this concept of moving on without moving on all the time and really our program is designed to emulate that aspect where you’re trying to move on, or at least show that there’s more to you than meets the eye.

And I think that’s what you’re missing, Anonymous. I totally get where you’re coming from and how you want her back really badly. And a lot of times I tell my clients to do counterintuitive things, but they work. I wouldn’t advise anyone to do anything unless there was real life applications.

And if you don’t believe this accusation audit or this idea of tactical empathy or trying to understand your ex’s worldview and how important that is, I highly recommend you check out that book called Never Split the Difference by Chris Foss. Incredible book. I’ve only gotten about 25% of the way through it because I have to work during the week, but during the weekends I’ve been pouring through it and I cannot recommend this book enough.

Just with the 25%, a lot of the stuff I’m thinking is game changing.

A lot of the stuff I already recommend just naturally because I found it works in the field of breakups generally, but there’s just a lot of stuff that are new, like this accusation audit and talking to your ex from her perspective and her worldview and understanding the difference between empathy and sympathy and how most of our clients are literally focused on sympathy or making their exes feel better when that’s not what will get them back. What gets them back is understanding their point-of-view and making them feel heard.

And the best way, Anonymous, that you can make her feel heard right now is to get some effing hobbies of your own.

As weird as that sounds and as counterintuitive as that sounds, the consensus in just the first seven comments I got on that thing were pretty much like, “Look, she feels smothered by you. She feels like you don’t have enough hobbies of your own.” And maybe you do have hobbies of your own. But what you need to do is really go all in on showing them and show her new depths to you.

Women are just like men when it comes to relationships. They can get bored in relationships. She should always feel like there’s new layers and new depths to you. And sometimes it’s hard to create those new layers to yourself after three and a half years of being together for a really long time. But this is a good time as any to get some new layers.

That’s going to do it for this episode. If you haven’t already, I would recommend that you take a listen to the podcast episodes I’ve released so far.

And if you like what you’re hearing, please leave an honest rating or review on our iTunes page.

I would really highly appreciate that. And if you want to see the actual responses from the women in my little mock ask of them, just go to the show notes of this episode, pull up this episode, this podcast episode and I will literally put that in there. I’ll see you next time.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ex-Girlfriend Recovery Podcast. Make sure you subscribe to us on iTunes and leave an honest rating and review. Also, don’t forget to take the free quiz to show you what kind of chance you have with your ex on our website, www.exgirlfriendrecovery.com. We’ll see you next week.

Today, we’re going to be hearing from a listener named Daniel, who has an interesting situation.

He’s in a long distance relationship and he sort of reeling from the breakup and as you listen to his voice message, you’ll notice that he’s a little noncommittal on whether or not he wants his ex-girlfriend back.

It seems like, and this is a sentiment I can totally understand.

It seems like he doesn’t want to put in the work if there’s not going to be a guaranteed result.

And that’s probably the most difficult thing for a lot of people when they begin this process, whether they want to get their exes back or not.

When they’re making that decision, a lot of it’s going to be based on, well, what are my chances?

How good of a chance do I actually have?

Is this going to be a waste of my time?

And unfortunately getting your ex back from what we understand is an inexact science.

In other words, there’s nothing I can say that will guarantee your chances of success.

But what we can do, is lay out the options for you and give you a clear idea of what we think might be best for you in the long run.

And Daniel is going to tell us about his situation in a minute here.

But one thing I think is important to mention is, when you’re trying to make this decision of whether or not you should be getting your ex-girlfriend back, you should first figure out what kind of chance you have of getting her back.

Now, luckily on Ex Girlfriend Recovery I’ve put together a special quiz.

And this quiz is special because it’s designed to make you or ask you questions.

And I want you to be brutally honest as you answer these questions.

And then we’re going to take your questions, we’re going to run them through what we see between our success stories and the people who aren’t succeeding, and we’re going to spit out a score for you that will give you an idea of where you stand with your ex. So you know if you’re wasting your time or not.

So if you want to take that quiz, it’s pretty simple.

Let’s hear from Daniel!

“Hey Chris, my name is Daniel from San Diego.

I recently got out of a relationship that was about a year and a half to two years long. And how it went about is, I was in a really tough spot emotionally, my dad passed away and I lashed out on other people through cynicism. And so, it ended up to the point where my girlfriend couldn’t really take it anymore. We were doing long distance by the way.

And she just needed like, as she put it, to be selfish. So, I wanted your advice on whether or not I should try to give her the upper hand and say, she’s justified in doing that, and try to re-establish at least a friendship with her. Or if I should just let it go and accept that she wasn’t really justified in doing so. Just let me know.

Thanks.”

All right, Daniel from San Diego.

I want to talk about your situation quite a bit.

Because there’s a lot of parallels that I’m seeing between the women who were trying to get their ex-boyfriends back through the Ex Boyfriend Recovery Podcast, and what you’re saying as you went through your breakup with your ex-girlfriend, right? So, let’s first recap Daniel’s situation.

So, Daniel says that he recently went through a breakup after about one and a half or two years with his ex-girlfriend.

And what he believes the catalyst for this breakup is, is the fact that his father passed away.

And of course, this just devastated him emotionally and caused him to view the world in a very cynical lens, right? So, by doing this, he pushed his girlfriend away, and then he mentions an interesting piece of information that I think is essential.

And that’s the fact that they’re long distance, right?

And so, I actually think that can play into breakups a lot more than you would actually believe. And I’m going to explain that in a little bit. He also said that one of her reasonings when she broke up with him was that, she deserved the right to be selfish. And he’s wondering if he should tell her that she’s justified, and play into purposely friend zoning himself.

So, there’s a lot to tackle here, but ultimately what I’d like to do is start by talking about some of the differences I’m noticing between men and women.

So, as you probably have heard, if you listened to the first few episodes of this Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast, I also run another podcast that’s quite a bit bigger, on the bigger website Ex Boyfriend Recovery.

Essentially thousands of women come every single day to the website, Ex Boyfriend Recovery, and basically try to get their exes back, their ex-boyfriends back.

And what’s interesting is, you get to notice after you interact with men who are trying to get their ex-girlfriends back and women who are trying to get their ex-boyfriends back, you notice some differences between how they interact or how they approach the situation.

Now, these are broad strokes. So by no means are they indicative of fact. I’m a big believer in that every single situation is unique, and it is in a way impossible to hit a one size fits all situation, but we can get close.

So what I’m looking at all of the data in front of me, the one thing I noticed about the big differences between men and women is how serious they are about getting their exes back.

Women, what I notice, when you talk to them, especially success stories, and I’m actually going to talk a little bit about this in a second.

Lately we’ve been doing this thing on the other podcast, we’ve being interviewing a lot of the success stories that are going through the program. And I’ll actually come into the conversation blind so I don’t know anything about their situation. And I like this because, ultimately if I don’t know anything about their situation, I can literally think to ask them some of the first thoughts that pop into my head.

And by doing this, the goal is to get closer and closer to understanding what the people who are succeeding are doing versus what the people who aren’t succeeding, well, they aren’t doing.

And what I’ve tend to notice is that women tend to be very, very focused from the get go on them wanting their exes back. Now, what’s interesting is today we don’t have a ton of conversations with men who have gotten their exes back because we didn’t have this podcast until just now.

The podcast is an invaluable tool, in my opinion, because it allows me to have conversations with men who are wanting to try to get their exes back succeeding and also failing. So that we can understand some of the subtle differences and basically understand what works in this process.

But there was one time in our private Facebook group. And if you go to the show notes of this episode on the Ex Girlfriend Recovery website, I’ll actually post the interview I did with the guy. But there was one guy that I did interview a couple of years ago who got his ex-girlfriend back.

His name was Aaron. And what I noticed is, even though he got his ex-girlfriend back, he seemed to be a little sort of iffy about whether or not he wanted to continue the relationship, or even totally put his all into it. And that’s actually a sentiment I noticed by a lot of men.

Women, when they go through the breakup, they want their exes back right away. Not all of them, but the ones who do, they know right away, there’s no if’s, ands, and buts about it. They want the exes back.

Men on the other hand, they know internally they want their exes back, but they have a hard time convincing themselves that that’s the right approach. And so, I couldn’t help but notice that Daniel has that same feeling. He sort of half in half out about it. He doesn’t know. You could tell he’s reeling, he’s been through a lot emotionally with the passing away of his father and now the breakup. So, for him, he’s definitely in this mentality, at least from my view, he’s in this mentality where it’s like, when it rains, it pours.

He’s thinking to himself, well, when things go bad, my father passed away and then she breaks up with me. And so, it’s really easy to get into this victim mindset as a male. And I would actually encourage you not to do that. Because one thing that we’re doing right now is actually revamping our entire program for men.

And so, in doing that, what we’re doing is basically giving people PDF courses, audio courses, and I’m filming video walk throughs as I go through my programming, trying to figure out what works.

And recently I just, and this is why it’s so on the forefront of my mind, but recently I just recorded this video walk through where I’m talking about downward spirals.

Downward spirals is essentially something that we noticed a lot of men go through after a breakup.

And that’s the fact that, when it rains, it pours.

So essentially, like one bad thing goes wrong and then another bad thing goes wrong. And next thing you know, you look at life in this very cynical way, which I think is what happened to Daniel. And what’s interesting about this, is there is a way to get yourself out of it, but ultimately before we talk about that, you need to first understand the mindset of someone who actually has what we call a downward spiral.

Where they let things go out of control and they have the victim mentality in how it goes.

But ultimately there’s like a self fulfilling prophecy that goes with these downward spirals.

So, imagine for a moment that you have this limiting belief, you think to yourself, you know what? My life sucks. And so, as you tell yourself this, you go through life and something bad happens to you. This further reiterates this negative internal belief you have that your life sucks. So you further believe that it’s true. Your life really does suck.

So you go through the next few days and you think to yourself, my life really does suck. Remember that one thing that happened to me? And then another bad thing happens to you, which further reiterates your internal belief that your life sucks.

And next thing you know, you just have this downward spiral where the more your internal thoughts, even when you think they don’t really matter that much, the more you tell yourself that your life sucks, it becomes this thing where you actually start believing it.

And so, what you need to do to get out of this self fulfilling prophecy, this negative belief system, I’m not saying Daniel has this totally, but he’s got a bit of this I think. Is start looking at the glass half full, which is a hard thing to do for people like Daniel, maybe, when they’re going through a hard time.

But try to find small wins to get yourself on the board, and then start feeding into those wins and believing that.

Because it will interact with all sorts of areas of your life. So instead of thinking your life sucks, correct yourself into thinking, my life sucks right now but it’s going to get better. And then when something good happens, start believing that, you know what?

This is proof.

It is going to get better.

And the next thing you know that will interact with all the other areas of your life that you wouldn’t expect it to interact with, which is a cool thing.

And we can create what we’d like to call an upward spiral.

So you go from the downward spiral and you turn it into an upward spiral.

And so, I think part of the issue Daniel’s having with whether or not he wants to get his ex back, is he’s in the midst of this downward spiral, he’s reeling. The other problem, I think, with Daniel’s relationship, is I happen to notice that he mentions he’s in a long distance relationship.

And this is where I think there’s a big disconnect between a lot of people who go through breakups that are long distance relationships. Because ultimately long distance relationships, and I will go to my grave saying this, they’re destined to fail, every single one of them.

Even long distance relationship marriages are destined to fail unless you have three things.

So, I’ll go from least important to most important.

What are the three most important things that you need in order for a long distance relationship to survive?

Let’s dissect!

The first thing you need is time.

So, think of it like this, long distance relationships, one of the things that the two of you don’t have a lot of is time to be together.

So you have to make time out of your day. She has to make time out of her day. And then you also need to make time especially, and I only know this because I was in a long distance relationship before i got married to my wife. And so, what we would do is often, since I worked from home and I run my own business, and this is my gig, the breakup thing.

I could make my own hours, so I could basically do whatever I wanted when I wanted, but she didn’t have that ability.

She had a normal job. So she would have to go to her boss and ask for time off. And then I would have to go and travel to see her or she would travel to see me, but time was an essential component. And sometimes time isn’t the easiest thing to get, especially if there’s kids involved.

Because kids take up time. You have to find someone to watch them. It can be a complicated thing. So some people, and this is just the hard truth. Some people can’t make long distance relationships because they don’t have time. The other thing and you need is money. Now, this is an odd one, but it’s an important one as well.

So, I’ll use myself as an example. I only know this because I went through a long distance relationship before my wife and I got married.

We had the time thing sorted out, because I was able to be patient and she could get time off of work every month or something.

She’d get like three or four days and I’d go see her for three or four days or she’d come see me for three or four days. And then we’re apart again. But in order to see each other, even if you’re not like super long distance, you have to just drive to each other.

You need money.

I had to buy plane tickets to go see her.

She had to buy plane tickets to go see me. Even if we were driving to each other, you’d have to pay money to get gas. You’d even need to pay money especially if you decide to get a hotel together or something along those lines. Money is an essential thing. And it’s one of the things that no one ever talks about with long distance relationships.

But again, if you don’t a lot of money, especially if you’re just coming out of college or you’re just in college and you don’t have a lot of money, you’re going to have a hard time making a long distance relationship work.

But those two things, time and money, pale in comparison to the third thing.

The third thing you need to make a long distance relationship work is a plan to close the distance. So ultimately, what I’m wondering when I look at Daniel’s situation is, he’s in the long distance relationship for one and a half to two years.

But in that time he didn’t mention like, oh yeah, we moved in together. He’s still long distance. So my point is, both of you need to be working towards a plan where you close the distance and are together. You don’t need to be living together, but you need to be moving close to each other to the point where it’s not long distance anymore. I mean, ideally you would like to move in together.

But long distance relationships, I can only see truly being successful for, and this is maybe a hot take, feel free to disagree with me. But I only see them typically being successful for people who are a bit older, who have money, who have time, and are willing to basically move in together to close that distance. And sometimes even when you close the distance you find you’re not the right match when you get together.

My wife and I, we decided to move in together. After about seven or eight months, we decided, let’s give this a try. We both had time, money and a plan.

We both worked towards that plan tirelessly. And so, what I’m wondering Daniel is, if you didn’t have a plan to close the distance with your ex-girlfriend, you’re going to have a hard time even trying to get her back because something needs to change the second time around if you even try to get her back.

And these are things to keep in mind. I would say, the plate is like the ultimate hope that you’re looking forward to throughout the long distance relationship, is the thing that keeps you going, that you’re both working towards a way to be together where you don’t have this distance, where you can see each other more consistently.

And if you don’t have that plan, if you don’t have that thing to look forward to, you’re going to have a hard time, maybe even convincing her to get back with you. Now, there are certain ways in which you breach conversations like that, of course, Daniel. But I think those are the things I would keep in mind for you. Generally speaking, your situation is not like… The strategy I would recommend for you is the general long distance breakup strategy.

But the reason I’m harping in so much on this time, money and plan ideal, is because that’s the part that no one ever focuses on. They only focus on the strategy, like, okay, I’ll use the no contact rule for 30 days and then I’ll start texting my ex, and then I’ll start phone calling my ex, or then we’ll start working towards that meet-up. And it’ll be this big romantic meet-up once enough value has been built. And once I see her in person, that will be enough to have her ask for me back or have me ask for her back. But it doesn’t matter if you don’t have those three things. You need time, money, and a plan.

Today, we’re going to be taking another listener question that we got.

Actually, it was the very second question that we got when I actually started launching the podcast. And a lot of it is going to be focusing on the reasons why ex-girlfriends break up with you and what to do about them. So I’m going to play the question. It’s from someone who wanted to remain anonymous.

What he said resonated with me because you could just tell the defeat in his voice.

And what I’d like to do is by the end of this podcast episode give him and some of the listeners some clarity on what ex-girlfriends really mean when they say you’re being too pessimistic or that they’ve changed or that you should move on because that’s something that not a lot of women will really sort of tell you what they really mean by.

So without further ado, let me play Mr. Anonymous’ question.

“My girlfriend left me a few weeks ago.

She said that I was too pessimistic, which I suppose I was, but none of the reasons she gave were really a deal breaker in anyone’s mind, I wouldn’t think, and I haven’t contacted her since the breakup. And I still have deep feelings for her. And she said that she wanted to be happy, or she said she needed to do what’s best for her. And that’s why I let her go so easy.

But since then it hasn’t been so easy, and I just don’t know what direction I need to take it. It’s been almost a month now since I’ve spoken to her, and none of the guides I’ve read have really hit my breakup specifically. And I was just looking for advice on that.”

Okay. There’s a lot to unpack here.

So what I’d like to do typically when I get questions is to sum them up so I can hit the bigger points and sort of help you.

So the person who left this voicemail just had his ex-girlfriend break up with him a few weeks ago.

And what I think is interesting about this particular situation is the fact that we got a guy who’s struggling clearly, but hasn’t fought for the girl yet because he’s falling into this victim mode of thinking what is best for the girls that he backs up.

And what I guess the thing that I would want to combat anyone who’s listening to this that they have is that anytime someone says that they’re going to do what’s best for them, or being away from you is what’s best for them, they really do mean it in the moment. That’s an important thing that a lot of people don’t quite understand.

I’ve been a long proponent of the fact that human beings are self-interested.

So especially when it comes to relationship decisions, they make self-interested decisions.

In other words, they’re going to do what they think is best for them.

So at this point of her life, your ex-girlfriend, Mr. Anonymous, she thinks that being away from you is what’s best for her.

So your overall game plan needs to be, how can I take that preconceived notion and prove it wrong?

And so what I thought I’d like to do is not only tell you how to do that, but also explain a little bit about what she meant when she said that you’re being pessimistic.

And essentially what she meant when she say that she’s changed or something along those lines.

And what’s really interesting is a few weeks ago, I actually wrote this article called What Your Ex Girlfriend Says Versus What She Really Means.

Now. I don’t understand women like I can understand us guys because we’re guys, I’m a guy. I can pretty much understand, hey, this is what a guy is thinking. But women are still sort of a mystery to me. But one thing I’m lucky to have is actually a larger website than Ex Girlfriend Recovery.

So a lot of you coming here and listening to this podcast are probably doing so on my website, exgirlfriendrecovery.com. And what’s interesting is exgirlfriendrecovery.com wasn’t the very first website I created in the relationship space. It was actually a website called exboyfriendrecovery.com, helping women try to get back with their ex-boyfriends.

I think you can see where this is going. But what’s interesting about this is there’s been a lot more women clients that have had than men clients.

And so one thing that we do is anytime we get a coaching client or anyone who buys our program, we let them into this private Facebook support group.

And this private Facebook support group is essentially the people that we view as like, hey, these are the people that are going to try our ideas out.

They’re going to report back to us. And a lot of times people will come to me and they’ll say like, “Hey, the reason I bought your program is you were actually showing real life success stories. I mean, you sat down and interview these people for hours trying to figure out like, hey, what worked for them and what didn’t work for them.” And the reason I can do that is because of our private Facebook support group.

So anyways, a few weeks ago, I got this idea for an article.

So I actually surveyed the men on Ex Girlfriend Recovery and said, “Hey, what are the five biggest questions that you want answered about what your ex girlfriend says? When your ex girlfriend says this, what is it that you want to understand what she really means, or the frame of mind she’s in when she says that thing?”

And the five responses we got were, hey, what does my ex-girlfriend mean when she says that she’s changed? Or what does my ex girlfriend mean when she says that she hates me? Or what does my ex-girlfriend mean when she says it’s too late? Or she says, we should just be friends or she tells you to move on.

And I was not going to tackle that alone because I don’t know. That’s the honest truth. I’m not some soothsayer, like people believe I am, which always kind of bothers me because it’s sort of like, well, I’m a human being too. I make mistakes and I don’t know everything. But what I can do for you is I can show you my data.

So I went anyways to the private Facebook support group and I polled all the women I could find there.

I basically put up a post and said, “Hey, I’m writing an article for my website, Ex Girlfriend Recovery, trying to help men understand what women really mean when they say X, Y, or Z.” And the response we got behind that article or behind that poll was really amazing. We got all sorts of really interesting insights and some of it really shocked me.

And so it’s sort of been my go to article anytime men asked me questions about like, “Hey, my ex-girlfriend said that she’s changed.” And I think that’s kind of the situation that you’re in here, Mr. Anonymous.

The fact that your ex-girlfriend’s says that you’re being too pessimistic and that she gave you all these sort of blanket reasons for why she wants to go through the breakup.

Ultimately the bottom line is she’s saying that she’s changed.

She’s moved past the relationship. And what’s interesting is we asked women in our private Facebook support group. And if you actually go to my website, exgirlfriendrecovery.com and find this episode, just look in the show notes area where I basically transcribed these episodes. I’m actually link you to that article so that you can actually read it. And you can actually see these screenshots that I posted to prove, hey, real women said this, and this is what they said.

And what’s interesting is when you look at when ex-girlfriends say that they’ve changed, that they’ve moved on or they give you some reason, that’s ultimately sort of like amounting to the fact that they’ve changed or their feelings have changed for you, what they mean is usually one of things.

This is what shocked me. So ultimately I was just going to tell people initially like, “Hey, when your ex girlfriend says that she’s changed, it means she’s moved past the relationship or feelings for you have changed. She means it.”

But when we actually polled real life women and asked them, “Hey, when you’ve said this in a relationship, what did you really mean?” women kind of came down in three specific camps, right?

The first camp was pretty obvious.

Her feelings have changed for you.

She’s not feeling attracted to you anymore.

So to put it bluntly, the group of women said that it means that when your ex-girlfriend says this to you, her feelings for you really have changed and she doesn’t want to be with you anymore. So obviously that’s not great for you, Mr. Anonymous, especially if you still have strong feelings for her.

But really it was the second patterns that we saw emerge in her polls that shocked me. So pattern number two was she wants you to change your ways before you try again. So basically these women think that not all hope is lost for getting back together. You just need to show her that you’ve changed. And the third pattern was she doesn’t like you that much anymore. So this group of women believe that your ex-girlfriend means she has outgrown your relationship. And as a result, her feelings for you have changed.

So when I hear your ex-girlfriend’s pessimism towards you, it seems to me like she follows either in pattern two, pattern three. My guess is you want to operate on the assumption that it’s pattern two. She wants you to change your ways before you try it again. So that sort of changes the narrative for you in a big way, because in my opinion, your entire goal should be about how can I take her preconceived notions and flip them on their head?

So let’s use an example using her own words. She thinks you’re pessimistic. So a lot of times when I explained to men like, hey, what you need to do is you need to create this internal paradigm shift for your ex-girlfriend, so that when she thinks of you, she doesn’t associate you with pessimism. She associates you with the opposite of pessimism. Positivity, right? So a lot of times, when I tell that to men, they take it the wrong way and try to directly approach their ex-girlfriend about it. They say, “Okay, you want me to be more positive? Well, whatever I talk to, I’m going to be more positive. I’m going to be happy all the time.” But it’s not enough just to directly talk to your ex-girlfriend about this stuff.

You need to actually indirectly talk to her as well as directly talking to her. So I’m a big believer in sticking to the general game plan most of the time, right? So anonymous here has said that he hasn’t talked to his girlfriend in a month. Well, that’s perfect. He’s already done basically a no contact rule. But when it comes time, what a lot of men especially fail to realize is that the no contact rule, a lot of people only think it’s for getting their ex back or making their ex miss them. But it’s actually so much more deeper than that because it’s also an opportunity for you to change your ex-girlfriend’s perceptions of you. So if she perceives you as this pessimistic sort of a homebody, socially awkward person. One of the best things you can do is actually utilize social media to combat that assumption of you.

So here’s kind of a shocking statistic. We’ve found that close to around 88% of exes will Facebook-stalk after a breakup.

So there’s a pretty high probability, like almost 90% chance that your ex-girlfriend will be paying attention to what you’re posting on Instagram. If you’re a Snapchat person, what Snapchat stories or Instagram stories you’re posting, what you’re posting on Facebook or any other social media platforms that you guys would consistently communicate on. It’s a pretty good guess that she’s going to be watching you. So you need to tell or cultivate the story that you want cultivated so that she looks at you and doesn’t think, “Oh, wow, same old, same old.” She looks at you and think, “Hey, this is different. This is new.”

It’s important that you do that, especially before you get back in touch with her. And a lot of people, a lot of men when I explain this to them, they don’t buy into it. So they nod their heads. They’re like, “Yeah, yeah, I get it, Chris. I get it. I’m totally cool.” And then they disregard everything I say. And then they contact their exes. And they come back to me and said it didn’t work. Well, it didn’t work because this is not the kind of situation where you’re going to get immediate results. This is the kind of thing where it’s a month long process of you cultivating the image and then getting back in touch with her and cultivate the image even further.

And what’s really great at some men who are really, really great at doing this will actually get her friends talking and her friends will tell her. And it’s even more powerful then because there’s a difference between her friends saying like, “Hey, have you seen Brad’s post on so and so, and such and such? It looks like he’s doing some really cool things.” Or like, “Have you seen what he’s doing?” It makes her pay attention more to what you’re doing. And I think maybe that’s what’s missing because if your ex-girlfriend views you as pessimistic, if she views you as being this guy who always sort of shoots down ideas, and I think someone who’s pessimistic is someone who’s like… Maybe she wants to be spontaneous. And you’re kind of like shooting that idea down and you just want to stay in.

Maybe a great way of combating that is to do something wild seriously on social media. Not wild in the fact like, hey, let’s go out and take part in some nutty sort of like cult. I don’t mean it in that way. I mean, it like, hey, let’s say she doesn’t ever view you as taking a big risk. So maybe your big risks could be like, let’s go jet skiing or let’s go on a hot air balloon or let’s go do something kind of like, let’s do something that takes her preconceived notions about you being a home body and kill it. And sometimes the hardest part for men when it comes to this is stepping outside of their comfort zone. A lot of times their comfort zone will say, “No, no, no, no, don’t do that. Don’t do that. Don’t do that.” But you need to step outside of your comfort zone.

I’ll never forget one of the first times that I got featured on a national level was someone wanted to do a piece on me for Fox News, right? And so what was interesting is it frightened the hell out of me. I’m not going to lie to you. I said no. My wife, she came to me and she was like, “Hey, these people, they want us to go on Fox News.” And I said, “I’m not doing that” because I was scared. It was outside of my comfort zone. But after a while, I really just thought and said, “You know what? I needed to take chances. This could be a good opportunity for me to get some national exposure and talk and show people like, yeah, I know what I’m talking about. I am an expert in my area or my field.” And if you want to watch that Fox News thing of me, I’ll just post it in the show notes of the episode so you can actually see what I’m talking about.

But ultimately it took all these steps to get me outside of my comfort zone. And I’m glad that I did it, even though it didn’t really give me great national exposure, to be honest with you. But other than that, my point is, don’t be afraid to take a risk. And a risk is only really a risk if you don’t know what you’re doing. And you know what you’re doing here, at least you have my sort of stamp of approval of, hey, let’s do something to catch your attention.

Now, a lot of times when people listen to these podcasts episodes, they want step by step game plans of like, hey, this is what you do here, here, here, and here. But I’m actually not a fan of giving those because I feel like they’re counterproductive in the fact that he should only… This is really one of the situations where if you’re a huge planner and you’d like to plan ahead from point A to point Z. It doesn’t really work out that way so much. Because I find if you plan a perfect plan, something along the way will go wrong and you will have to start over and reshape your plan continually. So I only like to plan the next step ahead at a time.

And I think right now, your step, shouldn’t be like, hey, let’s start practicing and planning when I should text her. I think before you text her, you should prime the new you so to speak. I’m not saying change your personality or anything like that. But I’m saying combat whatever preconceived notion she has about you. Turn them on their heads so that she doesn’t really view you as the same pessimistic guy that she may have viewed you as in the beginning. Step outside your comfort zone. Your comfort zone is great to have, but this is one of those areas. If you want to win her back, you have to be willing to take a risk. But remember a risk really isn’t a risk if you know what you’re doing, and you know what you’re doing here.

Hello there, and welcome to our first official episode of the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast.

Today, we’re going to be talking about a situation where you think you really have a chance, but your ex girlfriend has moved on and is now dating another dude.

We’re going to be talking about what the chances are of getting your ex back in that particular situation, as well as really what we’re seeing working and what’s not working when your ex girlfriend has moved on to another guy.

And really, before I really get started, the first thing I want to always tell everyone who is starting this process out is you really need to figure out if you have a chance of getting your ex back before you even embark on the adventure of trying to get your ex girlfriend back.

Luckily for you, we get asked this question so many times that on my website, Ex Girlfriend Recovery, I put together a special quiz that’s designed to basically answer that exact question for you and give you a few next steps on what to do going forward.

But this podcast, like many others of its kind, it’s going to be taking listener questions. And today, we’re going to be hearing a question from a man named Tom, who has an interesting situation where his ex girlfriend has moved on to another guy. But his ex girlfriend, now that she’s with the other guy has a bit of the grass is greener syndrome and is thinking maybe it’s not going to last with the new guy.

So you’re going to get my thoughts on Tom’s situation, as well as exactly what I think he should be doing to give him the best shot of getting his ex girlfriend back.

So without further ado, let’s just hear from Tom.

“Hello. My name is Tom. My girlfriend and I broke up about nine months ago. And during that time she got with another guy, but it’s been rough for her. She says it’s been ups and downs. Recently we’ve reconnected over text and she said that she doesn’t know how long this is going to last, but hasn’t given me any indication. I told her that I really want to give it another shot, and then she started to ask me to help her sister with an issue, so I did. Then she started to send me some pictures over texts of just fun pictures of her, and then she was reminiscing our relationship, joking about how I have long hair now and she always insisted that I have short hair.

So, I’m wondering what the chances are of us getting back together. Bottom line is she’s with a guy that she told me she doesn’t know how long it’s going to last, and then she’s given me these hints over text about reminiscing, and then sending me pictures of herself doing fun things like walking the dog. What does that mean? Do I have a chance? Thanks very much. Bye.”

So Tom is in one of the more interesting situations that I’ve heard in a long time, and that’s where his ex girlfriend has moved onto someone new and has basically come back to him and said, “I don’t like the guy I’m with,” but she still hasn’t broken up with the guy.

What’s up with that?

It looks like her breakup with him was around nine months ago.

He didn’t give us much details on what caused the breakup, which in my opinion or in my experience rather, usually there’s always a big catalyst for what causes a breakup when women initiate it. But I’d actually be interested to figure out if she initiated the breakup or he initiated the breakup.

So she gets with this new guy, but she’s messaging him constantly saying that she doesn’t think it’ll last with the new guy, and what does it mean when she’s sending him pictures and everything like that?

The first thing I want to point out to Tom is this concept of the being there method.

This is a concept that we accidentally stumbled upon in our private Facebook support group, and that’s essentially we had a situation where my wife was essentially coaching this woman. T

his woman had been in this situation where she had been broken up with by her ex boyfriend. I realize it’s not totally relevant here, but it’s the thing that we stumbled across that really makes the difference. She ended up coaching this woman and she asked for me for help.

So this woman who had been broken up with by her ex boyfriend, her ex boyfriend had moved in with another girl and was with that other girl and living with her. She came to us and she was like, “How do I get him back?”

Before we accidentally stumbled upon this technique, we would look at each other, my wife and I, and we would be like, “Let’s try this, let’s try this, let’s try this.”

And oftentimes, our efforts were not yielding many great results. So out of the ordinary, one day, I don’t know if it was her or if it was I, but we came up with this drastic idea of, “Hey, let’s just recommend her go into a super long period of no contact, a longer period of no contact. And then when she gets done with no contact, let’s purposely get her to friend zone herself and see if the new guy or the new girl gets intimidated.” That’s almost exactly what happened.

So it’s a little bit more of the gray, I’ll be the first to admit that, but my job isn’t necessarily to find out people’s morals.

It’s to test and see what works in helping you reconnect with your ex if that’s the thing.

If it’s morally gray to you, hey, that’s on you.

That’s not on me, don’t blame me.

So anyways, what we learned is oftentimes what happens is when your ex moves on to a new guy, you need to actually have a longer period of no contact and actually get back in touch with them, but without any kind of dating involved.

You need to purposely friend zone yourself so that the new guy becomes intimidated and bam, it’s just like things.

What’s interesting is I maybe feel that’s what Tom here did without even realizing it. But he still hasn’t gotten enough to push her over the hump. She still hasn’t broken up with the new guy, even though she’s saying, “He’s not treating me very well.” And I feel like the reason that Tom is getting these reach outs from this girl is because this girl is starting to have a bit of the grass is greener syndrome.

This is maybe an odd analogy, but it’s the most relevant one I can think of.

So those of you, and I realize I have another podcast called the Ex Boyfriend Recovery Podcast, it’s got over 150 episodes or something.

So a lot of the listeners there know me and they know how nerdy I am.

But since this is technically episode one of the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast, you guys aren’t really familiar with me, but I’m a nerd, super big nerd. I will read epic science fantasy or science fiction and fantasy books. I’m all over that stuff. I’ll play video games in my free time. I find out I don’t really have much free time anymore.

But anyways, my birthday was a few weeks ago. Right. And because of the pandemic and everyone being stuck inside, no one would ship me anything other than they gifted me an Amazon gift card. So what was fun is with this Amazon gift card, I’m thinking, what do I want to buy? And I ended up just buying books. I ended up stumbling across this book and I knew I figured with $300 worth of an Amazon gift card, if I can’t find at least one book that interests me … and I promise, it sounds like I’m going in the woods here but I’m not, I am going to get back into the ex-girlfriend’s situation. But let me make the analogy first.

So anyways, I thought if I can’t find one book, writers must really suck by now, or I’ve read everything that’s any good. So anyways, I went through and just for two days straight, anytime I had free time, I would go through Amazon and try to bookmark books that I thought might look good before I made my purchase. And eventually I came across this book that I was thinking, “Okay, yes, I’m sold. I want to read that.” So I read it the first night and I maybe read it for an hour and I thought, “Okay, that’s okay.” I read it the second night. I read it for maybe two hours and I was like, “Okay, it’s heating up. I see where this is going.”

Then I read it the third night. And the third night I just couldn’t put it down. I just kept reading and reading and reading. The next thing I know, I had been spending five hours reading at night. It was like 4:00 AM in the morning and I’m thinking, “I need to sleep.” So anyways, it was like, I would work really hard all day. I would come to read the book at night and I get really excited when I would read the book, and it got to be like this for a week straight. That’s all I would look forward to at night.

I would like wait til my wife and daughter were asleep, then I’d go and read this book. I would read it for as long as humanly possible because it was like, I was thinking, “This is the best thing I’ve ever read.” Then I finished it and then it was like a hole in my heart happened. I couldn’t find anything else. And the first thing you do when you read a good book is you go and see if there’s a sequel. Well, the sequel hasn’t been written yet. So it’s like, “Well, what do I do? Well, I’m going to find a book just like it.” What I think a lot of people don’t realize is going through a breakup and having the grass is greener syndrome is just like that.

Especially when women go on the rebound, they go through this breakup where they actually reminisce on the past. There’s this theory called the peak end rule, and the peak end rule states that, “Human beings actually have horrible memories.” We tend to categorize memories based on two distinct points. The peak, the most exciting part of the experience, and the end of the experience. So at first, we’re only thinking about the end of the experience. The end tends to be pretty bad when you go through a breakup. But after some time goes by, you reminisce and you start thinking about the peak. You just start thinking about the good parts and you start forgetting about those bad parts at the end.

So what ends up happening is you have these knee jerk reactions from women who move on to new guys. They’re only thinking about the end. They’re thinking about how bad it was at the end, but then they get into the new relationship with the new guy and everything’s great for a little while, until the honeymoon period subsides. You start peeling back all the layers, you don’t really like what you find and you get bored. And it’s just like, “Oh, what have I gotten myself into?” So what I think is happening here is maybe your ex girlfriend had that book, knee jerk reaction where she has this really great relationship with you, where she’s now beginning to romanticize the past of that relationship.

She’s moved on to a new guy because she’s trying to find something to fill the void that relationship left and realize that the new guy can’t fill the void. So she’s maybe trying to connect with you on the way things used to be. But also at the same time, she’s caught in between a rock and a hard place, because I think she’s scared to break up with the new guy.

Here’s another example. One of my good friends is actually going through a breakup right now. He said to me, he was dating this girl and he said, “I really liked her, but now I don’t like her so much, but I’m just going to see what happens.” And I said, “Well, why don’t you just break up with her right now?” And he said, “Well, I’m afraid of hurting her feelings.” Women are especially conscious of your feelings. Men tend to be a little bit more primal, women tend to be a little bit more nurturing in general. So they are a lot more concerned with your wellbeing. So sometimes if she’s caught in between a rock and a hard place, Tom, she’s going to be sitting there and thinking, “Well, you know what? I don’t want to deal with it right now because I know it will hurt the guy.” And maybe there are some good aspects about the new guy, but what your job should be, assuming you want her back, is to try to find a significant enough reason to give her an urgent reason to break up with the new guy.

So here’s what you can do. In order to get that urgent reason, because I already think you’ve done pretty much your job when it comes to getting her to want you back, she’s already showing some signs of that, and I think you’ve made progress where I’m like, “Hey man, you almost got this in the bag.” But what you need to do is get her to commit to you and you need a scarcity or urgent reason … a scarcity. You need an urgent reason to cause her to want to break up with the new guy, and sometimes that’s you getting hit on by other women. Sounds as weird as it possibly can, but she needs to realize … and I think part of the problem too, is this is a concept I see a lot more with men than women, where men, my men clients, if you’re going to ask me the difference between the women clients and the men clients, I would choose men as having an easier time of getting their exs back than women. But I think men fall susceptible to being used more often than women do.

That’s an interesting statement, but think about it. A lot of times women will use their ex boyfriends for emotional support to get through whatever hard times they’re having with the new guy. And that’s what you got to be careful not to fall into. You got to be careful not to be the hero all the time. You got to be careful to stoke some of her mothering instinct, but not stoke it enough to where she’s getting enough from you in return. Because there needs to be something that you’re holding back from her before she’ll actually … You’re only going to get me listening to your problems all day, every day, if we’re in a relationship together. So let me give you a quick crash course on what we found works to gain commitments from human beings.

There’s this concept called the interdependence theory, which posits that human beings, we make commitment decisions based on a pros and cons list, essentially. And the pros and cons list is made up of basically three distinct aspects; how satisfied we were with the relationship, if there’s a better alternative out there and how much we’ve invested in the relationship. But over the years, I’ve actually amended and added to the list because I find that the interdependence theory gives you the why people commit, but they don’t give you the what makes them commit.

What I mean by that is you can make every interaction you have satisfying with her, you can become the very, very best alternative to the new guy that she’s with, you can even become this superstar where you’re getting her to invest a lot of time into you, but it still won’t be enough to get her to take action. What gets people to take action in my experience is fear of loss and urgency. And often, the two there’s this interconnected relationship between the two, where if you create enough fear of loss, where if she thinks she’s going to lose you as a staple or as an option, that will get her to wake up and realize, “You know what? I need to be with the guy.”

So here’s the homework I would give to you, Tom. Think of it like this.

You’ve done a really great job with the being there method. You’ve been there, you’ve been this constant presence. She’s already showing some signs of cracking, but what you probably need to do is create a bit more urgency through fear of loss, and also make sure that you’re ending conversations first. That’s a big thing, especially I think a lot of women take advantage of men when they’re going through breakups. Women want emotional support from their ex boyfriends. And what they end up doing is they’ll come, and it’s often a sign that things aren’t going well in the current relationship they’re with, if they’re asking you for emotional support, and that’s what looks like what’s happening here, Tom.

But what I notice is oftentimes, men can leave themselves open to being taken advantage of. What I mean by that is if you’re giving only emotional support and she’s getting that aspect for you, she’s got no reason to leave the guy because she’s got you to rely on. So sometimes, it’s important for you to end conversations first. You want to have a satisfying conversation, but you don’t want to make it to where you’re taking care of her every single problem. It’s okay to listen, but don’t offer advice. That’s an important distinction because you don’t want to put yourself in a … you want her to be miserable with the new guy. That’s the important thing, and this is that morally gray area we’re talking about here, but that’s what works.

The other thing is ending conversations first leads you into this pattern where she’s always seeking more validation in another conversation with you, which could only lead to more investment, and more investment can often lead to more satisfying interactions, and more satisfying interactions can often lead to you being the best alternative. And then if you are the best alternative and you create a fear of loss and she sees that you’re not going to be around forever, guess what happens? You’ve got the momentum rolling. You’ve got the snowball effect going. She breaks up with the new guy. It takes a little bit time and then starts flirting with you. That’s what we want to have happen. That’s what we see happens.

Now, here’s the other piece of advice I’m going to give you, Tom. No matter how well you plan, something is going to go wrong. It just always does. The number one skill that you probably need to master is adaptation and also calmness, being calm in the face of basically all the chaos that occurs when you go through this situation is the best thing for you. So that’s it. Do that, Tom. Good luck.

Welcome to the very first episode of the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast.

Today we’re going to talk about what this podcast will be, my vision for it and when you can expect episodes to drop, but first things first.

After years of debating on whether or not I should have a podcast for my website, Ex Girlfriend Recovery, I’ve decided now is the time.

We’re going to be talking about all areas of breakups that you can possibly imagine, the good aspects of them, the bad aspects of them.

But most importantly, we’re going to be telling you exactly how you should be handling breakups from real life success stories.

Well, it’s going to feature, in my opinion, three types of content.

Number one is going to be the most common type, and that’s going to be listener questions.

On our website, exgirlfriendrecovery.com, we have a special area designated where you can actually ask us questions and you can leave sort of a voicemail and ask us a question about your situation.

Now, the one constraint I put in there is that the voicemail can be no longer than 90 seconds long.

Sometimes people have a tendency to get wordy and, while I love having details, what I don’t love is having too many details.

The episodes would be 50 minutes, if that was the case.

What we recommend you do, if you want your question answered about your breakup and what you should do to get your ex-girlfriend back, or how you can get over the way you’re feeling right now, is to actually leave a voicemail on our website.

Basically, all you have to do if you want to do this is just simply go to the podcast section on our website and we will get you taken care of.

You can leave that 90 second voicemail and then, if your voicemail is interesting enough, or if it’s on a topic that I think I haven’t covered before, I’ll feature it.

I’ll always make sure your name remains anonymous.

I’ll even give you the choice on whether or not you want to name yourself.

I’ll never say your last name. I’ll always, if you don’t name yourself, just say, “This is from anonymous,” or I’ll say, “It’s from Brett,” for example, if you wanted to be called Brett. It’s up to you, truly. That’s the first type of content you can experience here on the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast.

The second type of content will be just natural ramblings of things I’m noticing are working in the ex recovery space.

You see, a lot of people think that the art of reconnecting a couple after a breakup is sort of a set in stone type science where there’s one set of rules that work universally.

But I have found the opposite is true over my past decade of researching this concept.

What tends to happen over the years is that there’s certain trends and some things that we learn we couldn’t learn before because we didn’t have enough of a customer base to actually try things out on to see what was working.

So every once in a while, I may do an episode where I just talk.

I talk about, “Hey, I’ve had coaching clients and this is what we’re seeing is working.”

I’m a big believer in not just being derivative with our conversations. I’m a big believer in always trying to add something new to the phrase that you always have something new to think about.

Oftentimes what’s interesting is when you have real life success stories, you can learn about what they did and use those techniques on your clients and get them to see success.

Sometimes some of the things we learn shock us. So every once in a while, when something like that shocks me, I’ll come on here and I’ll tell you about it.

The third type of content that this podcast is going to feature is interviews.

I’m going to be going out and interviewing some of the best minds with relationships, self-confidence, basically anything you can imagine that I think will be helpful to you.

Now, these interviews will tend to be about an hour long, and sometimes I’ll even interview our success stories, men who have gotten their exes back, or men who have not gotten their exes back, but have moved on, or even sometimes men who just want to be featured and sometimes have sort of a live coaching session over the podcast.

We’re going to be giving a wide variety of content to you through this podcast and it’s really important that you pay attention to when these episodes come out. We’re trying to make this a weekly episode type situation where every week we have a new episode coming in. I’ll never be able to know ahead of time with regards to interviews or listener questions, because it’s an organic thing.

Sometimes the interviewer’s schedule will have to fit up with my schedule, so there’s never going to be like, “Hey. We’re going to do two interviews and then one podcast.” It’s going to be organic, but what I can promise you is that every single piece of content that will drop on this podcast will help you in whatever your quest is going to be.

Now, if you’re like a lot of the people listening to this podcast, the first thing you’re going to be sitting there and wondering is, “Well, I just want a podcast that can help me get my ex-girlfriend back.” Don’t worry. A lot of the content that’s going to be featured on this podcast will be in that vein, but we’re also going to be talking and tackling problems from different things that sort of have a relation to getting your ex back.

It’s important that you keep that in mind as you’re listening. I can’t tell you how often people will come back to me and say, “You know what, Chris? I really didn’t think what you said would work, but I tried it out and it made all the difference in the world.” So what you need to do is just keep an open mind if you notice I’m interviewing someone about clothing, for example.

The other thing I want to say is that this is going to be the second podcast that I have.

The very first podcast that I have is called the Ex Boyfriend Recovery Podcast.

I’ll let you take a minute to figure out what that one is about.

But essentially this podcast, the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast, is going to be set up much the same way.

Now, I can happily say the Ex Boyfriend Recovery Podcast, which is listened to by thousands of women every single day, has been very helpful.

In fact, we find that most of the people who visit our websites actually love listening to that podcast. I’m hoping to actually match the intensity and quality of that podcast with this podcast.

So if you want more of me and you want to hear maybe the female side of things and what you should be doing if you’re a female, you can even come to our other podcast and listen, if you just want more content.

But here’s the one thing that I’m going to ask for you. I’m going to ask that you always keep an open mind with whatever piece of content that you’re listening to.

Listen to the end, because knowledge is power, especially when it comes to getting your ex-girlfriend back.

One last thing, this podcast is going to be featured on iTunes, and even all the other podcasting platforms that you can imagine.

So, it would really help us out, since this is our very first episode, and this is more of a sort of teaser episode for what’s to come, if you could subscribe to this podcast and leave an honest rating or review on iTunes. The reason I pick out iTunes is because 70% of our podcast listeners will always come through iTunes because they’re the king of podcasts, and so how we rank in iTunes is really important.

I’m not sitting here and saying, “Give me a five star review and glowing reviews,” I’m sitting here and saying, “Give me an honest review with what you think about the podcast.

If it’s a three star review, that’s fine with me. If it’s a five star review, thanks. That’s fine with me too.” But what we do want you to do is just take a minute and just leave an honest rating and review because it can really help our podcast show up in the algorithms and we can help more people get their eyeballs on the podcast.

The final thing is on our website we have a special quiz that’s designed to help you understand what kind of chance you have of getting your ex-girlfriend back. A lot of people sit there and try to figure out, “Well, what kind of chance do I have of getting my ex-girlfriend back?” And they don’t know. We got the question so many times that I personally developed a simple two minute free quiz to help you understand sort of where you stand so that you know you’re not wasting your time in your situation.

Now, all you have to do if you want to take that quiz is to simply go to the homepage of our website, www.exgirlfriendrecovery.com, and there will be a prompt to take the quiz right there. So that’s pretty much going to do it. That’s what to expect from the Ex Girlfriend Recovery Podcast. I’ll see you next time.